Welcome to my 188
th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.
1. Mr Chapman MathsThank you to
@dalechapman.bsky.social for sharing some great new scaffolded resources.
The first one is a backwards faded task for recurring decimals. The scaffolding makes the topic highly accessible – this task could be used before students start constructing full recurring decimal proofs from scratch.
Another of Dale’s new tasks is on
calculating pie chart angles – again, there’s some excellent scaffolding here. I’ve also added this to my resource library. Thank you Dale!
2. 3D TrigonometryI really like these 3D Pythagoras and Trigonometry tasks produced by
@tiredoldcliche.bsky.social. The triangles draw students’ attention to what’s going on in these questions and encourage careful thinking.
These tasks can be downloaded
here and
here. I’ve added them to my resource library.
3. Year 6 Knowledge Organiser
Year 6 teachers (and parents of Year 6 children like me!) will find this helpful – @missjessrennie has shared a high quality Year 6 Maths Knowledge Organiser, including a quizzable ‘fill in the gaps’ version.
4. Sequences
Arithmetic sequences are full of opportunities for reasoning. I like this set of questions from
@catrionaagg.bsky.social.
5. A Level Resources
Thank you to @draustinmaths.com for sharing some new Year 2 mechanics resources for teaching moments at draustinmaths.com/a-level.
Colleen Young’s most recent blog post about A level revision resources pointed me in the direction of Swinton Maths where I browsed through some great resources. For example there are some tricky Venn questions, a hidden quadratics fill in the blanks and some Further Maths practice papers. Thank you @mrsmaths.bsky.social.
On the subject of A level – our Year 13s will get their mocks back next week and I’d like to give them a few minutes of quiet reflection once they receive their papers. I used to use a ‘5 Minute Mock Paper Analyser’ with Year 11 (for more about this read these posts from many years ago:
Y11 Post Mock Exam #5minplan: Pupil Self Evaluation and
5 Minute Mock Paper Analysis). Based on this idea I decided to make a
Year 13 Mock Exam Reflection on Canva. I’m not the best at design and it’s far from perfect but Canva is super easy to use for things like this.
This is how it might look when completed:
Job Vacancy
All the job vacancies I’ve advertised over the last six years have existed because we’re a new school – naturally we’ve needed to recruit every year as the school has grown. We’re a happy team and my school is a great place to work so we’ve had no turnover in the maths department. But now one of my teachers is leaving us for an adventure (teaching overseas), and this presents an exciting opportunity for a maths teacher to join my lovely team. This opportunity is open to anyone from ECTs to experienced teachers. It starts in September and it’s based in South London. If you want to chat about the role please get in touch. We’re looking to appoint before Easter so
apply quickly!
I’ll leave you with this which was tweeted by
@MathMatize. How would an integral symbol wear a tie…? My children were discussing a similar question regarding a giraffe wearing a bow tie recently.
